Canadian novelist you've never heard of." In 2006, with eleven out of fourteen titles nominated for or winners of literary awards, Maillard won UBC's Dorothy Somerset Award for excellence in the creative arts. 2010s In its 80th anniversary edition in 2015, the Quill & Quire listed Maillard as one of Canada's "notable Canlit talent" along with other American-born anti-Vietnam-War authors, Philip Marchand, Jack Todd, Judith Merrill, Mark Frutkin, and William Gibson. In his most recent novel Twin Studies (2018) -- set in Vancouver, Medicine Hat, and Los Angeles—Maillard returns to the topic of gender fluidity that he first explored in Two Strand River in 1976.Theo Dombrowski, "Gender, manga, and teen idiom," BC BookLook, 22 January 2019. Apple's iBooks reviewed the novel and described it as " a fascinating exploration of wealth, class, and gender fluidity [that] reads like a 21st-century Canadian version of Dickens' London novels." Steven Beattie, in the September 2018 issue of Quill & Quire, notes that Maillard's subject matter arises out of lived experience. "When the author began publishing, the language for describing gender-fluid approaches did not exist." As Maillard himself put it in his interview with Beattie, "You can't apply a term to yourself unless it is culturally available. I would now call myself non-binary." The Vancouver Sun summarized Twin Studies as "that rare work: a story that grapples with difficult intellectual issues without ever abandoning the novelist's primary duty -- compelling narrative." Maillard’s novel challenges the idea of isolated nuclear families and envisions what he says is “ a fluid larger family, in which people come together for other reasons. I think it's essential that we start rethinking family, that we start rethinking our connections to each other.”Twin Studies won the Alberta Book of the Year Award from the Book Publishers Association of Alberta and was shortlisted for the Relit Award. In an interview with Quentin Mills-Fenn of Prairie books Now, Maillard explained that his book explores ”the impact of traumatic experiences,” and that he firmly believes that “[p]hysicians and therapists who work with children and adolescents are telling us that a gender-affirming point of view from parents and, if possible, from the surrounding culture, makes for healthy and happy kids." Maillard's first non-fiction book, Fatherless: A Memoir (2019), traces the life of the mysterious father he never knew, and was well received in Canada.Sue Carter, "Keith Maillard talks about his absentee father's 'one last